It's the October reading roundup!
On the 3rd of November, 2007, I posted for the first time a list of all the books that I'd read in the previous month. Who'd have thought I'd be able to keep up with it for a whole year? Well, anyone who knows that once I start doing something a certain way, I have to keep on doing it forever, for one. It's been a year of fun for me and tedium for you. In the month of October, I read eleven books, and this is what they were:

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Intelligence Gathering
by Scott & David Tipton
The most consistently enjoyable Star Trek comics from IDW have been those written by the Tipton brothers with art by David Messina, and this was no exception. While no epic triumph, it's one of those kind of works that the word "solid" was coined to describe. The collection's plot is a little strange-- that level of access to Federation facilities and all the Romulans try to do is kidnap Data to help them with their science project?-- but at least there are no moments of utter bafflement as in IDW's previous tNG story, The Space Between. The highlight is the Tiptons' ability to capture the tNG characters, from Picard to O'Brien, most especially Riker and Data, who repeatedly shine throughout this collection. On the other hand, the chapter that focuses on the women of the Enterprise-D (Troi, Crusher, and Ro) strangely has them all under alien mind control! So what's the point? David Messina's characteristic artwork is also as strong as ever. Looking forward to this team's next collaboration, Mirror Images.

Crisis on Infinite Earth by Marv Wolfman
I already reviewed this in issue #6 of Faster than a DC Bullet, the only place in the world where it takes someone over a month to read a comic book.

Song of the Lioness, Book Four: Lioness Rampant
by Tamora Pierce
Finally, I've come to the end of the first quartet of Tamora Pierce's Tortall books. Thrillingly, this book opens with Alanna switching from being in a love triangle to a love parallelogram. It was tedious enough to see her waffling between two lovers, so why not throw in a third? Fortunately, in the Land of Magic, you can have consequence-free casual sex. Like The Woman Who Rides Like a Man before it, this is a somewhat disjointed book, and each half is of varying quality. The first half, featuring Alanna on a quest for a Magic Maguffin, is actually fairly good. The second half, however, gets bogged down in the return of the world's most underwhelming and unsurprising villain, Duke Roger. Oh, and Alanna's brother dies, but it's got all the emotional impact of a character death in Torchwood since he's only been in three other scenes in the whole series. At the very least, though, Alanna finally chooses a boyfriend and stops whining about how much attention she gets from the opposite sex. Even if the person she chooses is Creepy George, King of the Thieves, I'll take what I can get.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Shipyards of Doom
by Henry Gilroy
As I've previously bemoaned, last year Dark Horse's Star Wars comic series Clone Wars Adventures came to an end. It's been replaced by this, also a series of comics in the digest format, except that instead of having four short stories in a volume, there's just one long one, and the art (still provided by the always-awesome Fillbach Brothers) is in the style of the new The Clone Wars cartoon instead of the old Clone Wars one. There's really not much difference; despite the longer length, the story here's just as insubstantial as any of those in CWA, except that this has got Ahsoka in it, and I am praying that she gets impaled by General Grievous. But: it's just a little bit less fun, somehow.

Star Trek: Destiny, Book I: Gods of Night
by David Mack
It's the biggest Star Trek event in the history of Star Trek... or at least the past year or so. Crossing over tNG, Titan, the bits of DS9 that no one cares about, and the woman from Enterprise with the power of sexual healing, it's a story so big that the only word that can describe it is... stygian. Seriously though, this is a serviceable opening to the Destiny trilogy. Mack's characterizations are mostly decent, and there's some intriguing mysteries and world-building. Unfortunately, despite being the first volume of an ostensible epic... nothing much seems to actually happen. The Enterprise-E shoots a couple cubes, Titan flies to a new solar system, the Aventine looks at a derelict, and that's about it. Perhaps the most busy and interesting section was actually the flashback sequence, with the crew of Columbia. Not bad in any real sense, but very average for what's supposed to be start of an out-and-out "epic".

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
In my modern British literature survey, I read Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and I enjoyed it enough that I picked up another of her books. This tells the tale of a protagonist whose gender is never directly revealed (though she's a woman if I've ever seen one) and her love affair with a married woman. Who may or may not be dying of cancer. Even if it is about a lesbian relationship, Winterson's skill is such that it feels like it's about any and all relationships. Well, maybe not quite so broad-- I can't say I've ever had one like this-- but it still feels very real and very moving. The section where the protagonist is searching for her lost love is magnificently heart-aching, and the rest of the book is very good, too.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Volume Four: Daze of Hate, Knights of Suffering
by John Jackson Miller
This is essentially two separate stories. The first, Daze of Hate, wraps up the exogorth and Adascorp storylines from Volume Three. Camper gets a nice end, but other than that, this is pretty perfunctory. It almost suffers from character/faction overload, the story feels somewhat muddled, and the exogorth threat was always more goofy and abstract than anything else. Bong Dazo's dreadful pencils and inks don't help much, either. Fortunately, things pick up in Knights of Suffering, which sees the return of the fabulous Dustin Weaver to the art chores of the series at long last (even if the trade does credit Dazo for his work!). This is a return to the KotOR of previous volumes, in no small part thanks to Gryph, whose presence had been sorely lacking. Zayne gets some good romancing, and there's thrilling hijinks aplenty as he faces a member of the Jedi Covenant down back where the series started so long ago, on Taris. A bit of a mixed installment overall, but KotOR is still one of the best Star Wars comics ever published.

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
by Benedict Anderson
I had to read this book for my Research Methods class as an example of a theoretical approach for literature. As you might imagine, it was something of a difficult read. Anderson does his best, though-- he's actually quite good at clearly separating and enumerating multiple points. There's some great ideas in here, too, about what constitutes a nation, where nations came from, what cultural artifacts constitute a nation, and so on; he attributes nations to the rise of what he calls "print capitalism" as well as the collapse of a universal Catholic Church, among other things. I suppose what makes it inaccessible at times is the supporting data, which often derives from the South Pacific and other areas where I lack historical context and knowledge. Anderson has great ideas, but I feel like they get lost within the book-- discussing it with others and drawing these ideas out is highly recommended. Or, you can just read the chapter of Jonathan Culler's The Literary in Theory where he essentially summarizes the whole book for you. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book was the food for thought it provides about what comes after the nation-- Anderson doesn't really discuss this at all, but you can't help thinking about it and wondering...

Feed by M. T. Anderson
This is quite possibly the best science fiction book I've read in months, if not all year. Set in the vague future of America, in a world where everyone has a "feed" implanted in their brain that essentially connects your consciousness to the Internet, it's every bit as scary as that description implies. Anderson's grasp of language and character is masterful-- you immediately believe that these characters are real people, in no small part due to the fact that they talk exactly how disaffected teenagers would and do talk. The main character, Titus, is a bit dim but he knows, and his relationship with Violet is touching, but not overdone-- there are only sixteen years old, after all, so it's not as if they're going to be loves of each other's lives. Quite a bit of the book strikes way too close to home, especially for someone who spends as much time on the Internet as I do; the future that Anderson sketches out is all too real. ("The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.") Despite its serious subject matter, it's wickedly funny at times, especially in the extracts we get from the feed. But it changes gears easily and effectively, quickly becoming immensely moving. I have some quibbles, but overall I can't say enough about how much I liked this book. Go and read it.

Star Trek: Destiny, Book II: Mere Mortals
by David Mack
If little happened in the first book of this trilogy, even less happened here. There's some decent (if occasionally heavy-handed) character work, but on the other hand, the Titan plotline goes nowhere, and Enterprise-E/Aventine one is ultimately pointless, livened up by an irrelevant fight sequence at the novel's very end. As usual, the strongest part of the novel are the flashback sequences-- the fates of Captain Hernandez and her fellow Columbia crewmates are very well done and quite chilling. The cameos by Nan Bacco and her supporting characters from Articles of the Federation are also quite welcome. What is done well in all of these books, however, is the overwhelming sense of menace and doom-- you can't help racing through to find out what happens next. Mack has always known how to construct a compelling narrative.

Books acquired in the month of October:
1. Adverbs by Daniel Handler
2. Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Shipyards of Doom by Henry Gilroy
3. Star Trek: Destiny, Book I: Gods of Night by David Mack
4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Volume Four: Daze of Hate, Knights of Suffering by John Jackson Miller
5. Star Wars: The Dark Lord Trilogy by James Luceno and Matthew Stover
6. Star Wars Omnibus: Early Victories by Darko Macan, Louise Simonson, Terry Austin, Ryder Windham, and Bruce Jones
7. The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime by Jasper Fforde
8. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
9. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen illustrations by Gustave Doré
10. Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Inclusive Edition, 1885-1918
11. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
12. Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C. S. Forester
13. Kitty Foyle by Christopher Morley
14. Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale: The untold story of the BBC series by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook
15. The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
16. Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett
17. The Pelican History of England 8: England in the Nineteenth Century (1815-1914) by David Thomson
18. Pirates and Buried Treasure on Florida Islands including The Gasparilla Story by Jack Beater
19. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Taken from Accounts By His Own Hand and Other Sundry Sources, Volume I: The Pox Party by M. T. Anderson
20. Star Trek: Destiny, Book II: Mere Mortals by David Mack
21. Star Wars: Darth Bane: Rule of Two: A Novel of the Old Republic by Drew Karpyshyn
22. Fast Forward 2 edited by Lou Anders

#8-13 and 15-18 on this list come courtesy of the boxes of free books occasionally placed in the English graduate student lounge for our delight. It's a pretty eclectic mix, and it's not as though I need more things to read, but I can't pass up free. Especially a free first edition of Mr. Midshipman Hornblower.

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 137

Most of these covers are courtesy of LibraryThing, though many I uploaded to the site myself. Clicking any of them (or any other book-link in this entry) will take you the book's work page on the same site; clicking a series link will take you to its series page. Hovering a mouse over a book cover will reveal details on my acquisition of said book.

Steve